[ed. note: Speech I gave at the luncheon sponsored by the American Association of University Women and the Kansas City Public Library on October 3, 2009 after my book What's Right About What's Wrong won the Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Excellence. Pictures from the event here.]
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Anyone who’s read What’s Right About What’s Wrong probably noticed the list of thank-yous is quite long. That’s because it’s my first book. It’s also because I figured it would be my last book as well.
Perhaps I was the only poet in the world who did not want to publish a volume of her poetry. I had some 25 years of publications in literary journals, but as time passed I grew to dislike not just my poems, but writing itself.
I suspect the relentless clerical duties that face writers had something to do with it. But there was a deeper reason.
Writing had begun to seem so futile it was painful. Not because the audience was small, but because of my insignificance in the universe.
I suppose you could call it an existential dilemma, and what usually drives such dilemmas is fear of death. So I find it ironic that it was stage III ovarian cancer, diagnosed in 2001, that brought me back to writing.
Donna Trussell at Thorpe Menn Award
When your life becomes surgery, chemotherapy and every day waking up to the knowledge that your statistics are so grim it will probably all be for nothing, that puts a damper on just about everything.
Cancer survivors are supposed to be happy. Some patients say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. To those survivors I ask: Cancer’s the best thing that ever happened to you? What were you doing before?
Pop culture to the contrary, I did not believe positive thinking would save me. I figured by the time I adjusted to some “new normal,” as counselors like to call it, recurrence would thrust a whole new — and much more devastating — normal on me.
But I’m nothing if not a rebel. The more I felt pressured to become a model cancer survivor, the more I longed to reclaim my old, mean, sarcastic self.
In other words, my writer self.
In 2006 my essay Remember Me as a Writer, Not a Survivor was published in Newsweek. And that same year I began work on revising poems that would end up in What’s Right About What’s Wrong.
Since I liked only a fraction of my poetry, the book would have to be mighty slim. But a lot had happened to me since I wrote my last poem. During the process of putting together a manuscript, I found myself writing again.
And, as luck would have it, surviving.
In the summer of 2008, when my book came out, I started blogging. Hang around the literary scene long enough, and you know that poetry publishers need all the help they can get. It was the least I could do.
One of my blog pages is called Cancer Poems.
In 2003, when I organized a Writers Place reading on the topic, I went looking on the Internet. What I found were absolutely beautiful poems on the subject of cancer and its lingering effects, both physical and psychological.
Today I stand here proud of my book. I’m proud — and grateful and humbled — that I’ve managed to make and keep so many lovely friends who stood by me in my darkest hours. And I’m proud of the fact that if you google cancer poems, my blog is (at least for now) the first hit.
I’m going to close not with one of my own poems, but with a poem featured on my website. The poet is pretty much anonymous. Her name was Debbie. She had breast cancer. That’s all I know.
In her honor, and in memory of all the women we’ve lost to cancer:
Handmaiden of All I Survey
I am in charge of piled papers like towers.
Archaeological digs of
mail, newspapers, circulars.
Rearranged ad infinitum.
Breeding in slippery stacks on the kitchen counter.
I am in charge of molehills
and the corpses of small dead insects
that reside in the cracks of the kitchen floor
rustling like paper when the wind blows.
Of the red paint in the cupboard
and the bowl of fruit that stands on the kitchen table
sweating honey-flavored dew.
I am in charge of the photos
hanging on the wall
in the darkness of the hallway
of dead relatives and old dogs.
And the one of a girl child
dressed in a white sailor suit and a pout.
Bought from the junk man
because I coveted the oxblood frame
and her butter soft curls.
I am in charge of shoes with black buttons
and blue glass bottles
old holders of vile medicine
now sitting triumphantly on the window ledge
gloating at their good fortune.
I am in charge of the plant in the corner
with the name I forget.
Arrow shaped leaves
brown and curling at the tips.
It is slowly dying
for reasons I can not fathom.
Thorpe Menn Award finalists John Mark Eberhart, Donna Trussell, Matthew Eck
Congratulations to the two other finalists, my friend and former Kansas City Star book editor John Mark Eberhart for his book of poems Broken Time and former soldier Matthew Eck for his novel The Farther Shore. Eberhart gave a speech so eloquent that Eck and I were reduced to walking up to the podium and mumbling “what he said.” It’s a little bittersweet to win — or lose — to a friend, and Eberhart was as gracious as could be. [ed. note: Maybe Eberhart will post his speech here as a comment.]
Awesome post. MZ
Donna,
You’re pretty eloquent yourself, and really don’t need any help in that department from me, but since you asked, here’s a version of my speech that day — not an exact one, because I improvised a bit, yet close enough:
First, thank you for recognizing “Broken Time.” While I have written thousands of newspaper articles and hundreds of poems over the last quarter-century, I believe this collection represents my best work to date.
From a technical standpoint, “Broken Time” was not difficult to assemble. As I was writing in 2006 and 2007, I saw early on that I was creating two kinds of poems – one set dealt with music or at least referenced it, and the other set was wide-ranging, yet rooted in the landscapes of the West and Midwest. Hence a book with two sections, titled, with stunning originality, “Music” and “Lyrics.” Actually, I sell myself short with that dig; a number of the poems in the “Lyrics” section do follow the convention of lyric poetry, in which the poet directly addresses the reader, expressing thoughts and feelings rather than creating characters or devising a plot.
From an emotional standpoint, “Broken Time” was more problematic. It is no secret that during the time of its creation, I was caring for my late wife, Sherri, who by 2006 had been fighting breast cancer for four years. As that year and the following one unfolded, her strength ebbed – and now that I look back on it with a little distance, so did mine, although not in a creative sense.
I wish to address briefly the topic of suffering as it relates to the creation of any sort of art. It has become a cliché in our culture to say that hardship leads to artistic construction; that is not necessarily true. Good writing exists without the author having suffered; art of any kind can come into being without its creator having endured pain.
Yet it is undeniable that hardship can be a factor. Jim Harrison, the novelist and poet, remarked that the verse of his friend Ted Kooser deepened after the latter was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Kooser wrote many fine poems before he was stricken. It is true, however, that Kooser won the Pulitzer Prize and was named Poet Laureate of the United States only AFTER his struggle with cancer.
Sherri’s battle marked me, as has her death. But in 2006 and 2007, both of us were striving to find as much meaning and as much joy in life as we could, despite her pains, which were physical, emotional and mental. For my part, I was tormented, during that time, with thoughts of losing her, which of course did happen, but not until last October; in ten days, Sherri will have been dead for one year.
Yet “Broken Time” is in many ways a joyful book. In the music poems especially, there is a sense of wonder in many lines. Even in the musical poems which are not “happy,” I managed to convey my deep immersion, a lifetime’s immersion, into the various musical forms that have sustained me for four decades now, from classical to jazz to blues to rock ‘n’ roll.
The poems in the “Lyrics” section are darker. As “Broken Time’s” second half unfolds, the voice of the poet begins speaking of mortality, of chances and opportunities lost or not taken. I knew – we knew – Sherri was dying. Though I might have denied it at the time, I see now that these poems were a kind of venting for me – not necessarily of anger but of sorrow, and not sorrow only at Sherri’s illness and the fear of her death, but melancholy over the inescapable nature of the transience of all human existence. I am a realist; I know no one gets out of here alive. But in many ways, human life is a trick we play on ourselves – that is, we seek to enjoy the time we have, and to do so, we cannot face each day with hand-wringing over the fact that one day, we shall be no more.
The years 2006, 2007 and 2008 were among the most rewarding Sherri and I ever spent together, and they were in fact the very best years of our marriage. And as I wrote the poems that would become this book, Sherri served as my first editor. She, too, was an English major, having double-majored in English and theater. She was a very capable editor, and also an unforgiving one, which is exactly what a writer needs. We scribblers are advised not to trust the opinions of our family and friends, who, presumably, love us too much to tell us when we go wrong. Sherri loved me enough to tell me EXACTLY that. As I worked on this book, I revised and revised and revised, trying to please her. And when a particular poem simply did not accomplish that, I made use of an essential but often overlooked compositional tool — the wastebasket.
I am proud to be honored today along with Matthew Eck and Donna Trussell. I have read both their books more than once. While I cannot speak for them, as a reader I can state my firm opinion that hardship played a role, too, in the creation of their works. Matthew served as a soldier, and from reading his novel and talking with him, I know he witnessed things as a young man that he’d rather not have seen. Donna’s war was fought not on foreign soil but in a different arena, in the war zone that the human body becomes when one faces illness. Obviously, then, I feel a kinship with both these writers, but let me state the obvious today: I feel as if Matthew and Donna are brother and sister to me. Not by birth, but by experience, and by commonality, the shared factor being that the three of us chose, as writers, to take ownership of difficult experiences, and to strive to make them universal, and to share them with our readers, rather than letting them overwhelm us. To me, in fact, that is as good a definition of art as any I could offer. The writer Henry E. Sostman once expressed it more elouqently. In his long poem, “The Folded and the Quiet,” he wrote this: “I grow not out of salt nor out of soil / But out of that which pains me.”
My life has changed drastically since “Broken Time” was published. I am no longer a married man; I am a widower. I am no longer a journalist; I plied that trade for a quarter century but my career is over now. Yet I have been and shall always be a poet. And Sherri will continue to be my audience of one. Her body is gone but her spirit remains; I can hear her voice, and hope I always will hear it, as I write. I have completed a new collection of poems, which will see print soon. I remain dedicated to the idea that art is food for the soul; without it, we starve just as we starve if we are malnourished.
Of all the writing I ever have done, my verse has existed closest to my heart. It is, then, a great honor for me that you have chosen to recognize “Broken Time.” Though it was not my intent, the book’s title now describes the very time of its creation; the work has become a symbol of itself. With Sherri, I was indeed living a life in broken time. Without her, life often feels out of order, even wrecked and ruined (thank God for thesauruses). Today, though, is an unbroken day. Thank you for recognizing my work.
Dear Donna,
CONGRATULATIONS on the Thorpe Menn Award.
Thanks for posting your comments here and for encouraging John Mark Eberhart to do so, too. Eloquent, indeed. We thank you both for your books of poems and for continuing to write.
Best regards, ever.
David & Judy